


Forgetful

by AuditoryCheesecake



Series: A Cheesecake's Tumblr Shorts [12]
Category: Dragon Age (Video Games), Dragon Age: Inquisition
Genre: A Sort-of Cinderella, Adoribull - Freeform, Amnesia, Fluff, Head Injury, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-07-04
Updated: 2016-07-04
Packaged: 2018-07-20 03:31:31
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,041
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7388785
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/AuditoryCheesecake/pseuds/AuditoryCheesecake
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Bull walks into a tree, and he wouldn't mind a bit of a headache if he was able to remember who else has been leaving their things in his room.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Forgetful

He wakes up on the ground.

Muddy, wet, flat on his back. His knee aches and his head’s pounding like war drums. For a moment he thinks he’s all the way blind, but the old hurts are the same. When he cracks his eye open the world is painfully bright, and that’s almost reassuring. He doesn’t try to sit up, he can already feel the nausea roiling in the pit of his stomach. Gingerly, he touches his head. There’s no blood or pain there beyond scraped skin, so he follows the lines of his horns slowly out to either side. They, at least, are intact.

There is a dwarf staring down at him. “You told me your depth perception was fine, Tiny.” A joke, with an undertone of worry. This one is a friend. “Couldn’t see the tree in front of your face?”

The dwarf (Varric. His name is Varric) asks him all the questions he knows to ask when you think someone’s got their brain rattled. Who’s the Divine? There isn’t one. Where are they? In the Frostbacks on the way back to… Skyhold. 

What’s his name?

The Iron Bull.

He picks it out from the ruins of the other names. It is his, after all. His own, not the Qun’s. He only tells Varric the name, not the rest.

The dwarf looks pleased to hear it, and holsters his crossbow. The crossbow has a name too, though he can’t quite grasp it. “How am I supposed to know if your pupils are uneven when you’ve only got the one?” Varric gripes, and waits until Bull’s ready to stand.

Straight to the healers’ tents as soon as they’re through the tall gates of Skyhold. Scars on the outside of him are one thing, but he can’t gauge the healing of the soft bits inside his own skull. The ringing in his ears hasn’t let up, and the glint of sun on stone and snow is painful.

 

Farris clicks her tongue at him and orders him to his room. He goes with little complaint, though he watches her approach the Inquisitor with firm humility. His bed rest will be enforced. 

Krem frowns at him when he detours briefly to the training ring. He wasn’t about to pick up a sword, just check in. His boys wave him off, Blackwall is filling his place in the drills.

He’s accosted twice before he gets to the tavern stairs. Ma’am outside, Sera in, both checking on him to their own satisfaction. Both worried, neither quite saying it outright. 

It is a relief to close the door behind him and drown out all the noise of the fortress. Blacksmiths, merchants, soldiers, the songs from the Chantry, there are even some children shouting in the courtyard. The sounds don’t fade completely. There’s a hole in the ceiling.

He should get that fixed, he thinks. That makes him chuckle, for some reason.

He sits heavily on his bed, pulls off his eyepatch and works slowly at his brace. His fingers fumble a little, and he slows himself down, focuses wholly on the task that shouldn’t be this difficult. It’s frustrating and exhausting, and when it’s finally off he tips backward onto his bed with a huff. Too slow, too loud, too bright. He’d sleep but it’s still the middle of the day.

He shuffles through the belongings on his desk, annoyed by how many he doesn’t immediately recognize as his own, and the equal number that set something spinning in his chest that he can’t pin down the reason for.

A book, illuminated in the old Antivan style and written on vellum rather than parchment. He leafs through it looking at the images of medicinal and magical plants, the pages and pages of text that accompany each careful illustration. Why does he have this?

A mirror by the washbasin, though he’s never needed one, and a jar beside it. Not of horn balm or vittar, but khol, the type that goes around the eyes. There’s even a delicate brush, halla-hair, when he touches it, laid at the edge of the basin. He checks his own eye in the mirror, but sees no sign that he’s used the khol recently. The handle of the brush is far too small for his fingers, anyways.

A stray sock, _definitely_ too small to be his, under a pile of his pants in a hamper– which is just as odd come to think of it. He sits on the bed with too many quilts and stares at the sock in his hand, confounded. Doubly so, because he can’t understand why it sets him so off kilter. It’s almost like there’s been another person in his room, moving his things and disrupting his routine.

His head aches worse, and he lies down with a sigh, pulling a pillow over his face to block out the light.

 

He wakes with a start– it’s the middle of the night, judging by the angle of the moonlight on the floor, and something feels wrong. His bed is cold, too big, the pillows smell like something alien, something sweet, and he presses his nose to one, inhaling deeply, utterly confused.

It calms him, frustratingly enough, and he looks at the sock again. He’d fallen asleep holding it. He stands up slowly and drops it back in the hamper, gropes about for flint and steel to light the candle on the desk. He finds it eventually, in a drawer in the desk dusty and stuck from disuse.

He frowns around his room in the flickering light. Something isn’t right, but he can’t figure out if it’s because his head’s jangled or because something is actually– missing. Something’s missing.

For lack of anything better to do, he goes to his weapons rack (located in the western corner of the room, though he’s always felt better with a blade close to hand) and takes his whetstone off the shelf. If he can’t sleep, at least his hands shouldn’t be idle. He’s brought up short when he looks at the blades, though.

Hanging between his hand ax and an ornamental dawnstone blade the Boss had given him as a bribe to go to the Winter Palace, was something definitely, absolutely not his own.

The blade is not quite as long as Bull’s forearm, double-sided, and gracefully curved. He traces the intricate designs etched along the shallow fuller, that shimmer in the way that magical things do. Straps of leather hang from the base, long enough to wrap several times around the staff it should be attached to. Staff, definitely, not haft or handle or hilt. It’s the blade of a mage’s staff. What, by Koslun’s longest pubic hair, is it doing in his room?

It shows signs of use, a few nicks and scratches filed carefully down, and it’s wickedly sharp all along each edge. There’s no accompanying staff anywhere in the room. He sits on the floor, the blade across his lap, and stares at it, trying to solve its puzzle. 

Most people go lightly armed in the keep. Swords replaced with daggers (that Cole sometimes steals, he remembers) the blades removed from mages’ staves in a similar gesture. So the mage this belongs to is somewhere in Skyhold, and for some reason completely beyond the Bull’s comprehension, they stash the blade in his quarters if they aren’t going out on expeditions. Maybe they travel with the Inquisitor?

He sits and watches the glint of the candle flame on the silverite blade until it gutters out, then the glow of moonlight, and then blinks his eye to see the sunrise gild it bronze. He does not understand why he sits and holds the blade in his hands like a meditation.

 

He goes to the mess in silence, eats the porridge and egg he’s given in silence, and thinks. He gets nowhere.

Krem slides onto the bench on his right side. “Morning, Chief.” He’s not particularly cheerful. Bull grunts a reply. “How’s your head?” Krem asks after a few silent minutes.

“It’s been worse. I keep feel like I’m forgetting things though.” 

Krem pauses with his coffee halfway to his mouth, a tell imperceptible to anyone other than the Bull. “What sorts of things? Words to our song? We can fix that tonight at the tavern.”

“Things like why I’ve got makeup and a mage’s staff blade in my room when I’ve got no reason to have any of that crap.”

Krem blanches and turns to stare at him. Dorian drops onto the bench across the table. “What crap?” he asks, spearing a fig with his knife.

“The Chief’s got a mystery,” Krem says, “and I’ve gotta run! Late for a meeting with Skinner, wouldn’t do to keep her waiting! See you around, Hothouse, Chief.” He scrambles away.

“Is the mystery him?” Dorian grabs Krem’s abandoned coffee. “Ugh, he uses far too much sugar.”

Bull suppresses a smile as Dorian sips the coffee regardless, pulling a face. The ‘Vint could help him, actually. He’d know which mages in the keep used a blade like that. He weighs the embarrassment of telling Dorian that he walked into a tree against his potential usefulness, rules in the mage’s favor.

Dorian hears out his dilemma with a curious expression that Bull can’t pin down, mouth alternately twisting into a frown and a smile-like shape. “It sounds,” Dorian says after chewing thoughtfully on a sausage link, “like you have a roommate.”

“Why would I share my quarters with a mage?”

“Perhaps your arboreal misadventure knocked that loose as well.” Dorian shrugs and lifts his own cup to his face, Krem’s now empty. He inhales the scent of the coffee and makes a conscious effort to relax his features. Bull can still see the lines of tension in the edges of his mouth and the corners of his eyes.

“Well, I guess I’m probably fucking them. Regularly, if they’re leaving their crap in my room.” Bull stirs his porridge, spoons out one of the chunks of apple in it. “They’ll be pissed I can’t remember them.”

“They could be worried about your injury,” Dorian offers consolingly.

“Do you know who they are?”

“You’ve never introduced me to your paramour, if that’s what you’re asking.” Dorian keeps staring into his cup rather than look at the Bull. He was probably hurt by that, thinks that Bull didn’t think he was a good enough friend to meet his… whatever this person is. 

That’s crap, Bull thinks, surprised by his own vehemence. He’s crap. Dorian’s a great friend, he doesn’t deserve that sort of treatment. “That’s the first thing I’ll do once we find them, then,” he declares, standing up.

Dorian looks up at him with a bemused expression. “Very well.”

 

He goes to the mage’s tower first, just because there’s a lot of them there, so he’s got a greater chance of getting this done quickly. Dorian lingers outside the door. “It’s stuffy in there,” he says. “All that lyrium and bad fashion sense. Feathers everywhere.” He shudders comically and leans on the parapet. “I’ll be right here, if you need moral support.”

He brings the staff blade in with him, since that seems like a quick and easy way of figuring it out. Maybe someone will recognize it as theirs.

No one does. The mages he asks giggle or look at him askance, or tell him no with disappointed sighs. He’s sure he’s slept with some of them, at least once, but none of them wear kohl around their eyes.

Dorian lingers at the edge of every interaction, only stepping in briefly to assure Bull that it’s not Ma’am, and she won’t appreciate the joke.

It’s not the Boss, either. He raises his eyebrows at Bull with a worried frown, eyes darting from him to something behind him. Bull looks over his shoulder, but it’s only Dorian and Varric, talking by the fire. The Boss is more interested in his new knight-enchanter training than books about plants anyways.

Solas doesn’t wear socks. Neither does Dalish, or any of the other elves, at least not the ones from outside the Circles. Dorian snorts when Bull explains his reasoning, inelegant and loud.

Up in the library, Fiona gives him a severely unimpressed look, but she lingers over the blade for a moment. “You could ask Haritt who he forged it for,” she suggests. And so they’re off to the Undercroft.

“Forged that for you,” is Haritt’s answer, accompanied by a tap of his hammer on Bull’s chest. “A gift for your Kadan, you said. I don’t know anyone by that name. Move along.”

Bull stares at the blade anew. It holds even more mysteries now.

Dorian frowns when Bull asks if he’d ever heard Bull use the term, just as confused as he is. “I can’t say it’s familiar to me. Is it a name?”

“No.” Bull turns the blade over in his hands, careful not to nick himself on the edge. He tries to read the runes and designs. Is there a message in it? “It’s a Qunlat word, means “my heart,” in Common, more or less.” He gives up on searching the blade for answers and heads back toward the door. “Are you coming?”

Dorian is standing in the middle of the Undercroft, looking like he’d been struck by his own lightning. His hands are clenched tight at his side, his face… sorrow? Bull goes back to him, concerned.

“What’s wrong?” He puts a hand out, but Dorian ducks under it, head down.

“I think Krem’s abysmal over-sugaring of his coffee has finally caught up with me,” he says. Bull can hear the strain in his voice. “I’ll see you later, Bull. Good luck on your search.” And then he’s gone.

Bull looks at Haritt, who shrugs and turns back to his anvil.

Bull considers going to the tavern, but winds up on Vivienne’s balcony instead. He sits quietly on the floor and leans his head back against her settee with a small sigh.

“Is your head paining you, dear?” She asks.

“A little,” Bull admits, “but mostly it’s this.” He hands the blade to her carefully. “There’s a mage somewhere in Skyhold who trusts me to look after this, but I can’t even remember their name. I’ve been all over the keep, but no one will claim it.” No one will claim me, he nearly says, but that seems unnecessarily morose.

“Have you gone to the library?” Vivienne says. “Unless I’m extremely mistaken, this is Dorian’s blade.”

 

He goes, somehow even more confused than he’d been yet. Is it just the knock to his head that’s slowing him down this much? How long can it last?

Dorian’s at his window, leaning against the stone wall in what probably looks like a casual way to anyone who isn’t Bull. He’s deep in thought, arms crossed, face turned away from anyone who might pass his alcove.

Bull clears his throat, but doesn’t step onto the carpet that marks Dorian’s space. Dorian turns and looks at him with the same strange expression from the morning. Soft, sad, a little lost.

Bull holds the blade out, and Dorian takes it, and they stare at each other over top of it.

“Ma’am told me,” Bull says, and Dorian nods.

“You don’t remember, then.”

“I’m sorry.”

Dorian nods again, and sets the blade carefully on a shelf. He stands and looks at it for a long time. When he turns back, he looks surprised to see Bull there.

“I don’t get it,” Bull says. He doesn’t think that Dorian would follow him across the castle grounds all day just to laugh at him, but he just… doesn’t get it.

“Why you thought I was your heart?” Dorian’s voice is bitter. “Neither do I.”

“No,” Bull takes a step toward him, and Dorian takes a step back. “I do understand that. I don’t understand why you didn’t just tell me.”

“I meant to,” Dorian protests, “but you made up your mind and just… went. I figured I’d let you wear yourself out and then have a calm talk. Like reasonable adults.”

“How often am I reasonable, Dorian?” Bull asks, and he has to smile at the exasperated look on Dorian’s face.

“Far too often, actually.” Dorian takes a step toward him then.

“So, we should talk then.” Bull looks around at the single chair and Solas in the rotunda. “Your room or mine? Seems like there’s a lot you need to catch me up on.”

Dorian is caught in a moment of indecision. Bull recognizes the expression: he wants to ask for something, but thinks he shouldn’t. “I don’t want to intrude on your space. You don’t remember everything we’ve talked about, the things you’ve told me about yourself. I could– unbalance you. Catch you off guard.”

“I don’t know about that, my reflexes are pretty good.”

“Except when you walk into trees,” Dorian reminds him with a smirk. Bull doesn’t mind that he’s never living that one down, because seeing Dorian smile like that feels right.

He reaches out and catches Dorian’s hand. “Look, I might remember everything in the morning, I might still have a fuzzy spot or two a year out, I might never get it all to click back into place. Head crap doesn’t make a lot of sense.” Dorian looks at him sadly again, and Bull wants to fix that, however he can. “But I woke up this morning, and my pillows smelled like someone else, and it was wrong, because you weren’t there. Even if my brain doesn’t remember you right now, my body does.” He tugs Dorian closer, chest to chest.

Dorian’s expression twists from hopeful and touched to exasperation in a heartbeat. “You were doing very well for a moment there. Quite nearly romantic.”

But Bull’s preoccupied with the feeling of Dorian against him and the way his scent seems to calm something that Bull hadn’t even known was anxious. Dorian skims his free hand across Bull’s shoulder, and rests it on the side of Bull’s face, just under his eye patch. He tilts Bull’s head down toward him in a movement that feels familiar and right, and stands on his toes to kiss him.


End file.
